AMD, Nvidia introduce new GPUs

AMD has taken the wraps off its latest 'world's most powerful' graphics card - a claim curiously absent from Nvidia's announcement, made just hours before, of a new GPU of its own.

AMD, first. The card in question is the ATI Radeon HD 4890, with a speed of "nearly 1GHz", the company gushed. Almost, guys, but not quite. Wake us up when we get there.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4890: almost, but not quite, a gigahertz card

AMD didn't say exactly what frequency the 4890 runs at, but board sellers, such as Sapphire, are offering versions set to 901MHz and 850MHz, with the board's GDDR 5 memory clocked to 1GHz and 975MHz, respectively.

The 55nm part contains 956m transistors, many of which go up to form the 800 unified shader processors, which support DirectX 10.1 Shader Model 4.1 and OpenGL 3.0.